In November 2002, NASA published the Astrobiology Roadmap as a guide for its multi-disciplinary exploration of the origins, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe. The work of the SETI Institute falls neatly within the territory charted by the Roadmap. Indeed, NASA funds the majority of projects in the Institutes Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, and weve enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with NASAs Ames Research Center since the Institute got its start in 1984. Last week, this relationship entered a new phase, when the SETI Institute joined fifteen other research organizations as a lead team within the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI).
Our proposal for research and community building within the NAI pulls together a number of SETI Institute strengths, taking a unique approach to the three key questions posed by the roadmap: How does life begin and evolve? Does life exist elsewhere in the universe? What is the future of life on Earth and beyond? We proposed, and will now pursue within the NAI, a set of coupled research projects in the co-evolution of life and its planetary environment.
.The planetary environment helps drive the evolution of life and in turn, as life evolves to become a global phenomenon, it feeds back on its planetary environment. A number of our scientists are investigating that interchange between biology and the planetary environment. We ask questions about the ecology of early Earth that will help us understand the rise of oxygen on Earth; how life not only responded to this rise, but how in a way, it may have been prepared ahead of time by events and special niche environments to survive in a new, oxygenated world.
This is interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is that complex life is completely dependent upon an oxygen rich environment. In order to fuel the high-energy life style of an animal, abundant molecular oxygen must be present. Understanding the rise of oxygen is therefore important to understanding the potential for complex and intelligent life, at least for complex life as we know it on Earth.
At the same time, we are also looking at other planetary environments as potential analogs for early Earth. For example, we will contrast the chemical and geological dynamics on the icy surface and in the ocean below it on Europa with what may have been similar processes in the oceans of early Earth, which in some models was frozen over because the early Sun was fainter than it is today.
We will look even further down the line and ask what types of stars are most likely to have planets with environments that would be conducive to intelligent life. We examine the question of whether M-stars, which are extremely abundant in our galaxy (accounting for about 70% of the nearby stars), are or are not a place to look for possible extraterrestrial intelligence. There is a cascade of arguments about the habitability of these stars that offer great potential for investigation. We will gather the expertise at the Institute and serve as a focal point for other groups within the NAI to work with us, systematically looking at this question through a series of workshops. This is an example of how a question that is important to SETI (and in which the Institute has expertise) can be used to bring the astrobiology community together to answer a set of scientific questions that are also interesting in their own right.
An important focus of the SETI Institute is, of course, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, so its no surprise that in our NAI proposal we were able to fuse the "Life in the Universe" and the "SETI Research" parts of the Institute into a comprehensive project that reflects how SETI is a natural component of astrobiology. Its always been a strength of the SETI Institute that weve connected the search for extraterrestrial intelligence with the rest of astrobiology. That is something that were now glad to be bringing to the NAI.
All of this is in keeping with the Astrobiology Roadmap, which calls for a strategy that "recognizes novel biosignatures" and "ultimately should accommodate a diversity of habitable conditions, biota and technologies in the universe that probably exceeds the diversity observed on
."It further notes that "although technology is probably much more rare than life in the universe, its associated biosignatures perhaps enjoy a much higher signal-to-noise ratio current methods should be further developed and novel methods should be identified for detecting electromagnetic radiation or other diagnostic artifacts that indicate remote technological civilizations."
The SETI Institute has embraced this strategy and is pleased to lend its unique and respected competencies to the NAI. I look forward to sharing the results of our investigations as we move forward in this new partnership.
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